One of the things that Better Dead Than Zed does much better than the original All Things Zombie is to give me an emotional connection to the Star and his group of companions; partly because it starts on Day One of the outbreak, not two years afterwards, and partly because you are encouraged to play Day One as if it were actually happening to you.

As background for the 28 Months Later campaign, I wanted to understand better what would still be available to survivors over time once civilisation had collapsed. (Wargaming is very educational, and takes you off in all sorts of strange research directions.)

I originally planned to work this out myself, but then thought: It’s so obvious a topic that someone else must already have done it. And indeed they have; you can find timelines in increasing levels of detail here, here, and here. Since civilisation in ATZ collapses over roughly a one month period, you may want to adjust the timelines for the first year or so to reflect that.

This post is here just to draw your attention to Greywulf’s excellent idea of transplanting D&D 4e’s Nentir Vale into Cardolan, in Middle Earth, in 1650. Nice job, Greywulf.

I’ve been a huge Lord of the Rings fan since I first read it in 1970; all my kids love it too, and it will be very cool for them to realise gradually where they are. The human characters are easy to fit into this set up, and the longtooth shifter isn’t too different from Beorn; but I’m not sure how I’m going to explain the warforged yet. So, he needs to start attracting more NPC attention, as he is more unusual than the party realise.

I should ask Anna for advice – she is a proper Tolkien scholar, did her undergraduate thesis on LotR, speaks at conferences about Tolkien, and so forth.

My players have been known to complain that I’m so fond of house rules, they never play the same game twice. Even though part of the fun for me is tweaking the rules, I have tried to rein that impulse in over recent years, mostly to avoid that complaint, but also so that I’m sure I understand the rules before I change them.

However, I’ve reached the point with Warrior Heroes that I want to make a change, and since I play it solo, no-one can stop me! I’m changing the rule for generating the opposition so that it’s based on the number of figures in my party, not their CV. That brings it into line with most other THW rules sets.

Why? Well, my party will probably stabilise at 4-6 figures, because that’s the size of troupe I prefer to play. If I use the standard THW encounter rules, this will mean opposition of half to twice my numbers, namely 2-12 enemy figures.

If I stay with the Rules As Written, opposing forces will be based on my party’s Combat Value. Over time, I think the advancement rules mean this will stabilise at about 10 for each figure in my force, giving me a total CV of about 50 for a party of five. That would mean the enemies would be 25-100 CV in total, and since they have a CV of 1-2 per figure, I would be facing off against 12-100 figures. That moves away from the skirmish gaming I prefer; and most games would consist of the five man band moving onto the table, not liking what it sees, and moving off again.

One of the things that struck me as implausible when reading Earth Abides was that decades after the collapse of civilisation, the protagonists were still eating food out of cans they scavenged from old warehouses. “That can’t be right,” I thought. Yesterday and today, though, I did some research – this was driven by my starting to play All Things Zombie again, finally catching a repeat of Life After People on TV, and wondering how long our preserved food would last before completely non-survivalist types such as myself would have to learn farming.

It turns out that Earth Abides is correct, much to my surprise. The US Army is cited on a number of websites as studying this sort of thing, and determining that canned food is still good after 46 years in some cases – the record seems to be tinned veal from 1824, still edible when opened in 1938. The limiting factor seems to be that it starts to taste funny, and the testers begin to comment that they wouldn’t eat it even in an emergency, despite the fact that medical analysis shows it still to be nutritious (although vitamins A and C are lost after a few years).

Dried goods last nearly as long; things like rice, pasta, and flour are good for 25-30 years if stored properly, and salt, sugar and honey seem to last literally forever. (Or in my cupboards, until the ants find a way in.)

With the exception of some anti-malaria drugs, which fail stability tests after a few years, drugs seem to last a long time too.

Admittedly, these sites are secondary sources; the original reports are supposedly buried somewhere in the US DoD and DFA websites – I can’t find them, but since this is idle curiousity rather than life or death, I’ve given up after a few hours’ cursory search.

So now, apart from the obvious manufacturing need to have a steady throughput of products rather than one bulk order every decade, I wonder why we have such short shelf lives on most products?

It’s late in the evening after Encounter Two, and the new girl, Brown, can’t sleep. She wanders over to Reed and sits nearby while he’s on watch.

“Mind if I smoke?” she asks.

“Don’t strike the match where I can see it.” Seeing her put away her lighter and cigarettes, he explains. “No, I mean that literally. I don’t want to lose my night vision.” She takes them out and lights up, carefully, where he can’t see the flare.

“You’re Reed, right?”

“That’s what they call me,” he says, neutrally.

“So, where were you when it happened? Day One?”

“Most of us did things we don’t like to talk about.”

“I need more than that. I need to know what kind of people you are. You’re in charge; they’ll take their lead from you. What did you do, personally?”

“I went to get my daughter…”

* * * * *

So, I finally cracked and got All Things Zombie: Better Dead Than Zed, which is ATZ updated to the Chain Reaction 3.0 rules and with other changes, chief amongst which is that it starts on Day One, the day of the outbreak, rather than two years later. I’m thinking, what was Reed doing? Well, Reed represents me on the table, so what will I be doing on the day of the outbreak? You’ll recall that I set this according to the currently-popular Mayan end of the world thing, which makes it either 21st or 23rd December, 2012. Probably I will be at home getting ready for Christmas. My wife and kids will be too, there’ll be a fair amount of food and drink to hand, and in honesty at this stage I wouldn’t see the need for firearms, so why would I go out looking for trouble?

Aha. One of my daughters will almost certainly be at a party. So, into the car to recover her. Let’s assume I start as a Rep 3 civilian, but let me assure you, if I’m expecting enough trouble to go get her, there will be improvised melee weapons in the boot of the car. I’ve got a garden shed full of spades and edging tools; they’ll do. I’ll treat this as “spouse’s workplace” for game purposes. I look through the other list of locations on p. 64 and decide my second, and final, location for Day One would be home. The date rules out workplaces and schools, and the other locations don’t have anything I’d risk my life for on Day One – in reality, I think I’d stay home for a couple of days and try to ride it out. About Day Five, when we start running out of food, or whenever hordes of zombies start moaning “Brains…” outside the door, we’d wake up and smell the coffee…

I shall take Born Leader and Brawler as attributes, which retcons Reed a little, but so what. I base this on all the leadership courses employers have sent me on over the years, my 30 years leading teams, and my former martial arts hobby. (I plan to run some co-op ATZ with the family over Christmas, so their attributes will follow. Giulia ought to have Athlete, because she is very fast; and her mother is a great driver, so will get Transporter. More of that later.)

2d6 vs Rep 3 on the getting there table on p. 64: 5, 5. So I arrive one location later; my first location counts as location 2. There are 2d6 = 7 terrified civilians on the table who I must fight my way past. To represent fighting my way through the crowd, I must fight them in melee, one after the other. I’m a gentle soul, so this early in the outbreak I am probably just shoving rather than laying into people with a spade; however, they roll 2d6 in melee and I roll 4d6, as a Rep 3 Brawler, so it should still be workable.

I can’t figure out how to do the Zed or No Zed test – there being no zeds on the table yet – so I decide to skip it in the interests of speed.

Civilian 1: I roll for his Rep on the Civilian List (p. 9) and get a 2. Activation 1, 2 so we both activate. I roll higher so I go first and charge (as a Star, I can choose my result for this one.) C1 takes the Being Charged test; 2d6 vs 2: 5, 4 so pass 0d6 – he halts and may not fire (not that he has a gun anyway). He rolls 2d6 vs 3: 3, 4 = 1 success. I roll 4d6 vs 3: 2, 5, 5, 6 = 1 success. We each discard scores of 4+ and reroll. C1 rolls 6 = 0 successes. I roll 2 = 1 success. As I have one more success than my opponent, he is Out Of the Fight, which in this situation means he runs past me.

Civilian 2 is Rep 4 – fortunately he only rolls 2d6 in this fight. Activation 1, 3 so we both activate and again I go first. I auto-pass wanting to charge, he passes 1d6 on the being charged table so melees normally: 2d6 vs 3: 2, 6. 1 success. I roll 4d6 vs 3: 2, 5, 5, 6. 1 success. We each reroll 1d6. C2 rolls a 2, I roll a 5, and since he has one more success I am OOF and rendered unconscious. This location is over.

I wake up an unknown time later. The crowd has gone. No sign of my daughter. There is nothing to say the crowd has taken my keys, so I limp back to my car and head home. We’ll assume the mobile phone network is down as it became overloaded with calls; that’s what happened on 7/7 when I was in London. Staying here isn’t helping, so off to my second choice. A roll on the table on p.64 is now needed. 2d6 vs Rep: 1, 2 = pass 2d6. I arrive there normally, but I was late to the first location so it counts as location 3. There are no panicked civilians here, and the activation dice are kind, so I reach the house before anything untoward happens.

Hmm. Did my daughter arrive back? I decide to roll for her on the travel table as she will probably have had her own car with her – she usually does – and has no other locations to visit. She rolls 2, 5 vs Rep 3 = 1 success. Her Rep is greater than the location number so she reaches home while I’m still en route to the party house.

No matter, we’re all back home safe and can hunker down for the night. What would we do next? So far we’ve seen no zombies, so probably we’d go with the stay put option for the moment. Looking at the timeline on p. 53 for the first stage of the outbreak, sometime around day 10-14 we’d head out into the countryside. By about day 25 or so, we’d be living rough somewhere and looking for a safe area to use as a base. So, our first encounter of the campaign proper will be a Take Back encounter, in a rural area, during the daytime. Wish us luck.

From a gaming perspective, these two go together for me. I don’t use computers for in-game assistance – I did use DMGenie for a while, and jolly good it was too, but I eventually decided that any game I couldn’t run without computer assistance was too complex. (D&D 3.5, I’m lookin’ at you.) I do use character management software like MetaCreator (for Savage Worlds) and the D&D 4e Character Builder, but that’s as far as I go; I don’t like the screen between my players and I.

However, I’m a huge fan of PDFs. They have a number of benefits:

• Once you have the computer, the PDFs don’t weigh any more, or take up any extra space. Running out of shelf space isn’t a problem. Carrying a major part of my gaming library with me when I travel isn’t a problem, since I generally have a laptop with me. Up to a year ago, I would have said this was the main advantage.
• They are (mostly) searchable. Can’t remember where that pesky table is? Can’t remember the monster stats? Enter a keyword or two in Acrobat, hit search, and you’re there, much more quickly than skim-reading. These days, I’d say this is the main advantage.
• It’s easy to print out parts that you need – usually character sheets or quick reference sheets – without damaging your rulebook.
• Short products, or those with a weird page count, are viable in PDF even when they aren’t as a published book.
• The PDF doesn’t get dog-eared, coffee-stained, or lost. I still have it for as long as I have something that can read the PDF format, and it’s still pristine.
• I can magnify pages. This is starting to get important as my eyes get older.
• I can have multiple instances of the same, or different, PDFs open in different windows, and flip between them more easily than if I had the actual books laid out around me. This is useful because I do a lot of crossovers, with the setting of one game and the rules of another.

If you follow sites like ICv2, you will see game shop owners – and sometimes publishers – complaining about PDFs hurting their sales. Maybe that’s true; I can’t say, I don’t work in a games shop any more. There’s another side to this story, though.

Firstly, I am more prepared to take a risk on a PDF product. Let’s face it, most of the game materials I buy are read a few times, then languish on the shelf forever. I’m more reluctant to do that with hard copy.

Secondly, the argument against PDFs assumes it is cheaper for me to buy a PDF and print it off than it is to buy the rulebook. Not so; the PDF is often the same price, most schools and businesses frown on people who print out 200+ page full-colour books, and if you trot along to the copy shop, it generally costs more than buying a hard copy, besides being bigger and less professional in appearance.

Thirdly, the argument assumes that a PDF bought is a hard copy sale lost. As per my first point, most of the PDFs I buy are things I wouldn’t buy if they were only available in print. Further, I use the PDF to evaluate a game, and for travel use afterwards; if it’s a game I am actually going to play, I generally buy a hard copy as well, and often multiple copies so that everyone in my gaming group has access to the core rules (they make great presents for fellow gamers). I am possibly not typical in this regard, but I suspect I am not unique, either.

Let’s look at True20 and Savage Worlds as examples of this. In both cases, I downloaded the free quickstart rules to evaluate. I was intrigued enough to buy the full PDF rules. Those I liked well enough to start a campaign, which led to me buying a hard copy for myself as GM, and later several more for the players. Then I started buying the supplements as well. (I point out to my wife that, as vices go, my gaming habit is fairly benign and not that expensive. But I digress.)

When I do buy hard copies, I try to do so from a Friendly Local Games Shop. This is because I want them to stay in business. Hard copies may (or may not) be more expensive than PDFs, but I consider any extra cost to be a kind of subscription. The FLGS doesn’t only offer games, it offers a place where I can meet other gamers, chat about games, get advice, and sometimes play as well – personally I think that’s worth paying a little over what Amazon or RPGNow would charge.

In the run up to Christmas, gaming always has to take a back seat, so I’m not playing much at the moment. I can still hatch plots, though, and currently I’m looking at the time- and space-saving properties of hexmaps.

I’d love to have proper wargames scenery, but I have no-where to store it. That led me to the idea of battlemats, which fold flat. Experience from the solo gaming threads has shown that I’m spending about 25% of my actual gaming time generating and setting up terrain, and I want to reduce that; which leads me to the idea of a few standard terrain layouts, one of which can be selected and deployed in a few seconds and stored flat when not in use.

There’s a fair amount of this about – go to RPGNow and search by product type for “2D Buildings/Terrain” under “RPG Accessories” – but due to the dominance of D&D, it is almost all set on a 1″ square grid. This has two problems; firstly, diagonal moves give a figure an advantage; and secondly, the grid is a little small for 28mm miniatures – their arms bump into each other. To give them some room to manoeuvre they need about a 35mm grid. There’s also an annoyance, in that most of them are 6″ square terrain pieces that print out on A4 or Letter size paper, wasting over half of it.

However, some sort of grid is useful, because I find it faster and easier to count spaces than measure with a tape measure.

Grognards will see where this is going. I need some standard maps with a hex grid, such as those used in SPI or Avalon Hill games of the 1970s and 1980s.

I’ve already selected 28mm figures as my scale of choice, so I need maps with 35mm hexes. That eats up table space, but I can declare one hex to count as 2″, which will mean my table will behave as a somewhat larger one. Sadly, such maps are hard to come by; most hex wargames use a 15-20mm hex and small card counters, and even they are much less common than they used to be.

A rummage through the Wargames Graveyard under my bed, where old games go to die, reveals that I have some flimsy paper battlemats with a 1″ hexgrid from the days of GURPS, and a set of maps for the board/miniatures hybrid wargame Daemonworld, which are actually pretty good, but now out of print. The picture below shows a party of adventurers facing off against a couple of warforged on those maps.

Encounter on the Daemonworld map

The maps I like best, though, are those from Cry Havoc, sadly out of print these 20 years, but available electronically and (sometimes) in hard copy from Cry Havoc Fan. These maps have a 20mm grid, but by printing an enlarged scan, I can get one Cry Havoc map to fit my table almost exactly, with 35mm hexes. So those, and the Daemonworld map, will become standard in my battle reports going forwards.

And the lesson learned? If you see something you think you might want for your hobby, don’t hang about, get it as soon as you can afford it. If you wait for a later time, it will be out of production when you come back for it.

This technique saves both space and time in actual play, and in preparation for it. I use it mostly for dungeon crawls, either solo or in small groups face to face.

The picture below has come out unusually blurry even for me, but you can still see enough to get the idea; there are three maps at different scales, which saves space on the tabletop.

Zooming in: The party's location in the dungeon at three different scales.

Working from left to right, we have:

[Left] The overall dungeon map; actually, a map of the London Underground. The green pawn represents the party’s location. Stations marked on the map represent room complexes; I stole an idea from Neil Gaiman and have the station name indicate the main features or inhabitants of the complex – Blackfriars, for example, is an evil temple. Each line represents a different level, with stairs between levels occurring in stations where several lines meet. Lines between stations (which I describe as wide corridors) are of indeterminate length, and scale is largely irrelevant on this map. I don’t usually share this map with the players, and for smaller dungeons it isn’t necessary at all, you can work with just the room complex map (centre) and battlemap (right).

[Centre] A room complex map. Each 18mm square represents 10′. This is used between encounters as the party moves about a particular room complex; once you roll or draw for initiative, the action shifts to the battlemap. The green pawn represents the party, and the red pawn their opponents, who have just come in sight as the party round a corner. At this scale, the party generally fits inside one square. This is one of the maps from GDW’s Asteroid, scanned and printed at a larger scale; the “London Underground Dungeon” is highly modular and reuses the Asteroid maps repeatedly, although the contents of the rooms do vary.

The major time-saver here is that the party can see the room complex map, so I don’t have to describe the layout or lay it out in dungeon tiles, and they don’t have to draw it. If playing solo, I don’t have to generate the dungeon either. While this gives the players information about the layout that the characters don’t have, since they still don’t know what is in each room, I find it doesn’t affect game balance much.

[Right] The battlemap. A small area of 1″ squares, each representing 5′. This map is used in encounters, where you move into detailed combat time. I draw the walls and doors in erasable marker on the map, although I used a thin marker today and it doesn’t show up well in the picture. You can see the square grid, the party, and their opponents. Because the battlemap is relatively small, it has to be redrawn more often, which offsets some of the time saved; you can minimise this impact by printing out a pile of the small battlemaps, or by shifting from 28mm figures to 15mm or 10mm. If I used a graphics programme to print out the room complex map split over four or more sheets, the squares would be about 1″ across and I could use it directly as a battlemat, albeit one with lots of 5′ corridors; but that starts to degrade the space advantage.

If you’re serious about keeping gaming in your schedule, you need to be alert to dead time. Those little 10 or 15 minute chunks of time that you can use to set things up for later.

Your daily commute is a good example. If you’re not controlling the vehicle (say it’s a train), you can use it for reading (dead tree or PDF editions) and maybe writing, depending on how crowded and bumpy it is, and how much you care what other people think about your hobby. If you’re (say) driving the car, you can still listen to podcasts – I learned a lot about D&D 4E from the podcasts on the WotC site, burned to CD and played while driving to work.

Your lunch hour is another, if your job still allows you that luxury; same comments apply. Due to my job, lunch now generally consists of a short period with a phone in one ear, typing one-handed while taking occasional bites from a sandwich – but I wrote about half of GURPS Traveller Alien Races 2 on a Psion 3c during my train journey to work and lunch hours, a few years ago. Be warned; you will need somewhere to hide and concentrate, otherwise you will be dragged out of your reverie to work on today’s crisis.

If your work takes you away from home overnight, you probably have some time available in the evening, or before breakfast, depending on your timetable. About 20% of my Warhammer 40,000 army was painted in hotels while staying overnight on business, and this is also good for solo games or Play By Email (PBEM). (Personally, I find playing on a forum relies too much on my having regular, predictable slots of free time, and internet access during those slots, so it doesn’t work for me. Your Mileage May Vary.)

Much of this blog is actually written the same way; except for game write-ups, I tend to write each post in chunks a few minutes long, edit it, email it to the blog, and then log in to set up categories and so forth. So what you read in a few minutes can be the result of several days’ work in short chunks of dead time.

Now, I was going on to talk about PDF games and laptops specifically, but I think they deserve their own post. More of this later.

This is the first and most obvious target for gaming on the run; I suspect most wargamers spend a lot more time painting their figures than playing with them. I used to paint when fellow gamers were not available, but now that this doesn’t happen anyway, I’ve decided I may as well use the time for solo gaming. Thus, the painting has got to go; but unpainted figures lack visual appeal.

I’ve already decided that I will game in 15mm, 25mm or 28mm, as they fit the available space and my skirmish gaming bent. My lady wife draws the line at the idea of my paying someone to paint figures for me, and much as I love gaming, I love her more, so I shall respect her wishes. Besides, it’s awfully cold in the garden shed at this time of year.

This leads me to look at what is easily available in the pre-painted arena. Other factors in consideration are that soft plastic stands up well under abuse from small, excited fingers; it would be nice to mix and match across ranges; and I like to choose what I’m getting rather than take pot luck with random booster packs. As previously stated, it turns out cost is not an issue, due to the small numbers of figures I actually need. (I’m also toying with the idea of using card counters for RPG mooks, minions or extras, to give a quick visual cue on how tough foes are, and reduce the amount of space and money allocated to figures. However, counters are a separate topic for another post.)

Half an hour of surfing reveals I can basically forget any scale outside of 25-35mm, and narrows the available choices to those below.

Any paint job that looks right from arm’s length is good enough for my purposes, and for 28mm figures is equivalent to viewing a real person at 40 yards or so away, at which range a lot of detail starts to become invisible.

em4 Miniatures: Cover a wide range of genres, metal, about 28-30mm high, better painted than I can do myself, £12 for 5 so about £2.40 each. Easy to see which figures you are buying.

Rackham: Confrontation (fantasy) and AT-43 (SF). Hard plastic, 35mm high on a 30mm base, very nicely painted. £16-£20 or so for 6 basic troopers, so about £3 each. Very pretty, but the 30mm bases would be a problem for storage and for use on a 1″ = 5′ grid, which I often use; so reluctantly ruled out.

Reaper: Legendary Encounters fantasy range, soft plastic, billed as 25mm but probably 30mm to match D&D miniatures, nicely painted. I have yet to find anyone who sells them in the UK, though judging by the US prices they would be in the region of £2 to £3 each.

WotC: D&D fantasy, Star Wars SF, Heroscape many genres. Soft plastic. Height varies quite a bit – looking at the D&D 3.5 basic set I bought a few years ago, Regdar is nearly 35mm tall even crouching; Aramil is 28mm fully erect. I can paint better than the early ones, though I hear the quality is improving. Cost varies between £1 and £2 per figure if you use all of them, I reckon I use half or less so effectively about £3 per miniature.

World of Warcraft Miniatures: Fantasy, billed as 40mm high (so my guess is at least 45mm in reality), probably plastic, paint jobs look reasonable, work out at about £2.50 per figure if you use all of them, with my usual “only use half” CMG rule of thumb that’s about £5 per figure. These are ruled out on size grounds as they will be too big both for my figure case and for the 1″ grid.

So, it looks like a mixture of em4 and WotC is the way to go for painted figures. One quick raid on the piggybank later…

The Usual Suspects

Left to right:

• D&D 3.5 mini “Regdar”. I reckon this fellow would be 40mm if he stood up straight, which makes him 8′4″ in 28mm scale and 7′ 8″ in 30mm. Come on fellas, I know he’s a big lad, but really…
• D&D 3.5 mini “Aramil”. 30mm tall, 6′ 2″ in 28mm scale and 5′ 9″ in 30mm.
• eM4 generic pawn. 30mm tall again. I keep wanting to draw smiley faces on these.
• eM4 wizard from Elfsera set 1. 30mm tall so the same height as Aramil.
• Games Workshop “Boromir” from their Lord of the Rings range. About 32mm, or 6′ 7″ in 28mm, 6′ 2″ in 30mm. (Prepainted but from eBay, which is also a valid source of prepainted figures, though the price is very variable depending on bids.)

The average real-world human male is about 5′ 9″ for comparison. So we conclude that either 28mm is really 30mm, or all the manufacturers are measuring to eye level not the top of the head. We also conclude that they would all peacefully coexist on my gaming table without looking weird. Finally, we conclude that I have to use a better camera than the one on my mobile phone for these shots.